It's a great big beautiful tomorrow

Here in these halls of science
Here in these towers of art
We have built the true defiance
And girded the nation's heart.
Not with enduring stone
Or muscles that twist with pain
But with fires that burn
A vision in the brain
A tri-colored flag was cut
For us with subtle sheers.
No doors we open can shut
In a hundred thousand years.

- Helene Margaret, Tomorrow America

We witness a retreat from the romantic ideal of public life. The Depression and impending war has shaken American notions of community to their core. Arcadian promises of open vistas and peaceful concord between self and society are bypassed as corporate and government planners focus the nation's attention to the "world of tomorrow."
Doubts about our ability to construct a better world are silenced; they must be, if the nation can face the adversaries of self-doubt within and totalitarianism abroad. With world's fairs, from the Victorian period through the postwar era, we discover sites of social planning on the grandest scale. However, even as superhighways, nuclear-powered cities, and gleaming appliances promised by the fairs fill our cultural landscape, dystopian fears of totalitarianism have not been crushed with the defeat of Axis powers. The federal government has become a more significant force in public life than ever before. Thousands of suburban gardens bloom, but the subtle machinery of control grows just beneath America's well-manicured lawns.

St. Petersburg Times, Tomorrowland - "The future, like just about everything else, is owned and operated by the world's corporate and government power brokers. It's a future filled with products -- a better this, a smaller that, a quicker whatever."

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